Vice's New Envelope-Pushing Docu-Series Premieres on HBO Tonight

Most Read

There's a good chance the future of news is currently being created in a North Williamsburg warehouse. Vice, the small Canadian magazine turned media giant, launches their weekly docu-news series tonight on HBO. The thirty-minute episodes promise to bring viewers "news from the edge," the Vice way.

Those familiar with the Vice view of the world might question how a group of irreverent, rebellious twenty-somethings led by proven media bad boy Shane Smith are going to illuminate serious political and international issues. Is the same company known for pulling stunts like sending Dennis Rodman to North Korea really going to deliver hard-hitting journalism? Smith has an answer for you: "People think because Vice is irreverent and because we're crazy, we're stunt journalists. You know what? I don't actually care. It's our job to get into the hardest-to-see places and bring back the best footage—we have the best footage of North Korea ever shot. If that's a stunt, then I'll keep on doing stunts until I die."

Judging from the series' first episode, which airs tonight at 11 p.m., Shane has the material to back up his statement. Early scenes from the show find Vice correspondents—tattoos, skinny jeans, and all—traveling with a group of North Korean women. They're making the dangerous journey across borders for a hopeful escape or immersing themselves with pre-adolescent suicide bombers. And this isn't a stunt—it's real.

The media company, which has always captured the quickly shifting attentions of the 18-24 set, has earned some gravitas of late (and not just because Fareed Zakaria is a consultant on the show). The partnership with HBO is actually a natural pairing, Smith says. "They're the gold standard for TV and especially storytelling. We wanted to challenge ourselves to be on the gold standard of television and finally have a platform for our form of storytelling. It comes back to if we can tell the best stories out there, then we'll be stoked."

So where would Smith love to send correspondents next? He's thinking the kingdom of Mustang (harder to get to than even North Korea) or a secret CIA base in an "incredibly dangerous" place. "The majority of the stories we do are very carefully planned," he says, "So if you are being hijacked, by the state or a group, we've figured out the protocol to get people out."